Are you liberal or conservative? Are you for economic equality or for the 1%? Are you for LBGTQ or are you against marriage equality? Are you a Catholic Democrat, or a Catholic Republican?

We llloooooovvvve debating these questions. It takes up the majority of my Facebook newsfeed that has become more of an alternate front-page news source if I can get past those endless “16 things you forgot to thank your high school friends for, I will always remember number 6!” (I totally don’t remember number 6.) These debates rage in the Catholic Church (in America) as much as they do everywhere else in the country/world. Specifically in Catholicism there’s the liberal “social justice” Catholic and the conservative “doctrinal” Catholic, fighting for control of the Church. According to this binary, label-making way of thinking, Pope Francis takes the side of the first, and Pope Benedict XVI takes the side of the second. I think a lot of Americans subconsciously picture the liberal/conservative debate like World War II, and of course whatever side we pick is the Allies, the winning team, the right side of history, and the opposition is the fascist Nazi Axis that tried to conquer the world but is now collapsing in on itself.

How the debate actually looks is more like World War I. We dig our trenches and every now and then we try to charge across no-man’s land to storm the other side to win the war. Then, through the machine gun barrage of articles and tweets and blogs posted in the media we get mowed down by the defenders on the other side and retreat back to our own trench where we regroup and wait for the other side to attack to mow them down.

The sides we take are ideologies. Neither will win. Neither has true power . Whatever gains one side makes and vice versa will be wiped out when the grindstone of time turns the Roman, oops I mean American, Empire into a fine powder in the annals of history. It will all come to nothing. These ideologies are our modern mind’s equivalent to the idols of the ancient world. We idolize these camps of thought by elevating them, and America, to the eternal, as if it will all last forever. We serve them to death, but ultimately for the gain of nothing.

Their trick is they disguise themselves as being all good by using parts of the Truth but not the whole of it. Using only parts of the Truth leads to dysfunction, decay, and suffering, but it seems good enough to bite the worm on the hook. Even Hitler made people happy by giving them some good things: for example, the Autobahn, which is the reason America has its highway system, because it’s actually a good idea. We can’t allow ourselves to be deceived by the disguise of ideologies, though. They’re the slavery of the “free” world.

If nothing we build using these ideologies will last forever, what will? Well, let’s look to something that has stood firm for 2,000 years, has seen the rise and fall of nearly every kind of power and principality, and has only grown when the powerful try to wipe it out. It’s the Catholic Church!

The early Christians saw right through the political customs of the Roman Empire, the Roman way of life, which was wrapped up in its mythology, and decided not to participate in it. (By that point, An﻿cient Roman religion was an outward show, inwardly they didn’t really believe in the gods or used them as metaphors for life lessons and interpretations.) Believe it or not, the early Christians were accused of being atheists because of their refusal to be a part of this outward show. The Christians lived outwardly according to their inward belief in the one true God, the God who is being itself, the God who is substance itself, existing through the fading of all of our puny little human inventions and actions into nothingness. Here’s the shocking thing, though, because the Roman and Greek philosophers believed in that same God, the God who is being itself, or at least the concept of it. The Christians believed that true God above all the myths to be personal, close at hand, loving, even… becoming a human himself, dying a real death on the Roman Empire’s most effective death device of state-sponsored terrorism ever, and rising from the dead gloriously three days later. The Christians believed in Jesus Christ, the Son of the living, true God. He is true substance. Whatever is built on Him will last for eternity. Worshiping Him is uniting oneself to eternity, to freedom from the nothingness of ideologies. The Catholic Church has professed this faith in Jesus Christ for 2,000 years, since Peter said of Jesus, “you are the messiah, the Son of the living God.” Fast-forward to 2014 to Pope Francis, the successor of St. Peter in an unbroken line of successors to St. Peter. He professes that same faith. He does not take political sides; he sees right through the ideologies of the liberal “social justice” Catholic and the conservative “doctrinal” Catholic. He doesn’t participate in that outward show that comes to nothing. In fact, he even condemns those ideologies outright. “When a Christian becomes a disciple of ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought.” –Pope Francis, in a homily given on October 7, 2013. In reality, liberal and conservative don’t exist in Catholicism. The question is about the true God. Are we living in the Truth? Do we know the One who is forever? Have we completely allowed His Son, Jesus Christ, into our lives? And do you know who’s been saying the same thing as Pope Francis? Pope Benedict XVI. You can read it in his Introduction to Christianity, Chapter III, sections 1 and 2.

﻿So how about we make like Pope Francis and start following Christ? No more self-referentialism. No more ideologies. No more trenches. No more enslavement. Lets live outwardly according to the true faith that we believe in inwardly and call the world to that faith.